The reform in the dairy industry led by Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, is essentially a renewed attempt to revive an old plan that has already failed in the past. It will not lower the price of milk for the consumer, but it will severely damage farmers’ livelihoods and the food security of all of us.
Behind slogans like “free competition” and “reducing the cost of living,” there hides a cold and alienated economic move that cancels, among other things, the planning in the industry that protects the dairy farmers and the target price that also protects prices for the consumer, and opens the market to free imports that will collapse local production.
This is the same cold approach of the Finance Ministry officials, who look at the dairy farm and the farmer only through an Excel sheet—and ignore the national, social, consumer, and security importance of the industry to the state of Israel as a whole.
To put it simply, this is not a reform. This is a plan to eliminate the Israeli dairy industry!
In Israel, 620 dairy farms operate in kibbutzim and moshavim, producing about 1.5 billion liters of raw milk a year, of which 430 are moshav dairy farms, most of them in the country’s border areas. The dairy farm is not just a business—it is an economic anchor, an employment engine, a center of life. When a dairy farm closes, an entire community begins to empty out. In 2025 alone, 21 moshav dairy farms closed, and each one is a red warning light for Israel’s national resilience.
In the war we saw how farmers continued to supply produce under fire, including the dairy farmers who supplied fresh milk even when rocket fire and terrorist infiltrations threatened their lives. The farmers did not stop for even one day. This is food security in its deepest sense: the state’s ability to feed its citizens even in a time of crisis.
But instead of strengthening the farmers, the Ministry of Finance is acting to weaken them. In the name of “competition,” it’s launching a reform for copious imports that will strengthen the importers and severely harm the Israeli dairy industry and lead to the closure of dozens of Israeli dairy farms. In the long term, we will pay a heavy price.
Israeli agriculture is not an Excel table. It is a national mission. If we do not stop this reform now, we will find ourselves dependent on Turkey or Poland, and then we will all end up crying over spilt milk.
Amit Yifrach is the secretary general of the Moshav Movement and Chairman of the Israel Farmers Federation.
